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Quick Tips for Formulating a Disaster Recovery Plan for Data Centers

April 13, 2017November 7, 2017

Information is a very valuable tool in this day and age, and this is why a great deal of money is spent in protecting it. Several methods are used to do so, including backing up the information. In-house data centers may serve as decent storage locations for such data, but they can be affected by disasters such as fires and natural disasters. In such cases, it is possible to lose all the data if it had not been backed up in another location. To avoid such issues, it is normally a good idea to come up with disaster recovery plans for such data centers, particularly if you own one. When doing so, some of the tips that you should follow to be thorough include:

24/7 Help Availability

Most data recovery centers contain data that is important enough such as any downtime will not be tolerated. In the case of any disaster that disrupts the service of the data center, the priority would be to sort out the effects of the disaster as fast as possible. This means that when coming up with disaster recovery plans, one of the tenets you should use is 24/7abailabilty, so that assistance is present throughout the day and night. Depending on the type of data in the data center, this may even include holidays as well.

Sort Out Redundancy Limitations

Redundancy is a strategy whereby data is stored in one location, and then copied to another location as well. For instance, one can have two data centers that are some distance apart. The point of data redundancy is to ensure that the data will still be present even if one of the data centers is completely taken out.

When doing this however, you should plan for the limitations of doing this. For instance, having to buy multiple hardware in order to effect redundancy may be expensive, and may surpass your budget. Rather than doing this, you could instead go about it by using more high tech methods such as thin provisioning and virtual machine snapshots. This way, you will still have the data center, as well as these methods to provide redundancy.

Ensure That You Learn from Mistakes

Mistakes when making plans for disaster recovery for a data center is not necessarily a bad thing. You can learn from them, and end up with a much better and more secure data center than before. This is especially considering that you would be trying to protect the data center from disasters, which are usually not predictable. You can find out about the mistakes that other companies made when setting up their data centers and plans for disaster recovery, and then use them as a basis for making your own plans. The more information you use this way, the more ground you cover regarding formulating the disaster recovery plan.

Involve Your IT Staff

When formulating disaster recovery plans for data centers, don’t forget to involve IT staff. Remember, they are the ones who are likely to be in contact with the system more than other people. The main role of the IT staff in this process is to first consider the needs, requirements and hardware that the company is running, and then develop requirements for disaster recovery as well as provide disaster recovery plans that are customized to the business.